A couple of weeks ago, an obscure Californian autonomous driving start-up by the name of Zoox created a bit of a murmur in the US tech and finance press.

This company wanted to raise a large dollop of funds - as much as $US252 million ($343 million) Bloomberg reported - at a valuation north of $US1 billion, which would make it the latest so-called "unicorn". The Wall Street Journal added it to its billion-dollar start-up club. Surprisingly so, for a business hardly anyone had heard of.

There's a good reason for that. Zoox has been operating in "stealth mode", a thing that some start-ups do before they officially launch their product, to avoid altering competitors to their plans. And it gets even better. It turns out the the person driving all of this is a little-known designer and creative entrepreneur from Melbourne.

His name is Tim Kentley-Klay. Previously he ran an animation studio. Now, as Zoox CEO, he is effectively leading an attempt to beat the titans of the technology industry such as Apple, Google, Tesla and Uber, and the giants of the automotive establishment, such as General Motors, in what has become the most fascinating race in global business: the race to build a fully functioning, self-driving car.

Except Zoox is not actually building a "car". But more on that later.

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Very little is known about Zoox. The Australian Financial Review can reveal that one its early backers is Sydney-based Blackbird Ventures (which, among others, is itself backed by Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes).

In March it became one of a handful of companies to be awarded a permit to test a self-driving vehicle on the roads of California. And the CEO of $US13 billion, Nasdaq-listed software company Autodesk seems to be a fan.

Kentley-Klay declined to comment for this article, citing the company's stealth-mode status. However, the graduate of Camberwell Grammar School and Swinburne University in Victoria, according to his bio, did speak extensively about the business at a conference last month hosted by Hudson Pacific Properties, a real estate investment trust listed on the New York Stock Exchange (and Zoox's landlord in California).

In that candid and public presentation, which hasn't yet been reported, he provided unprecedented insight into what the company is actually up to. And it's as wild as you might expect.

More than just a car that's self-driving

"We don't see ourselves as an autonomous car company," he said during the presentation. "We actually see ourselves as a robotics company, not an automotive company. And I think when you look at mobility through that lens, you start thinking differently."

Zoox has more than 140 people, 40 of them with PhDs, working on its secret project, he revealed. They include co-founder Jesse Levinson, previously a member of Stanford University's autonomous driving team. For now, he indicated, they are focused on developing the artificial intelligence needed to power a truly autonomous vehicle – not the engineering aspects needed to actually produce vehicles at scale.

"We think can create an artificial intelligence system through a mobility vehicle that can actually deal with dense, urban dynamic driving," he said. "If you create that, it's so powerful, you're going to be able to generate the capital to actually create the vehicle architecture in which that AI system sits."

And "vehicle" – not "car" – is the best description for what they are building. Kentley-Klay is adamant that, in the same way cars were nothing like the horse-drawn carriages that preceded them, self-driving vehicles will be nothing like cars.

"We don't need a forward windshield, we don't need a steering wheel, we don't need side mirrors, we don't need windscreen wipers. We actually want to optimise the architecture for machine vision, not human vision. And then we can also change the interior experience to optimise what we want to be doing, not for the business of having to sit behind a steering wheel."

A costly bet

It is surely going to be an unfathomably expensive exercise. And with Google and Apple, insurgents like Tesla and Uber, and General Motors all eyeing autonomous vehicles, Zoox is facing competitors with incredibly deep pockets. Which means the whole plan is daunting at best, downright insane at worst.

With aims for a product to be on the roads by 2020, the long-term vision appears to be to build an Uber-style, automomous taxi service involving very comfortable vehicles.

"This product is kind of like halfway between private car ownership and public [transport] meeting in the middle," Kentley-Klay said at the presentation. "When you're not using it, someone else is. But when you're in it, it's like a private car or better experience. Maybe one day, even like a little bit of a jet experience."

Kentley-Klay says the company has a key advantage over its rivals in that it is not trying to build a "car".

"What makes Zoox different, I think, than anyone else is a lot of people, I think, are just looking at trying to make a car self-driving," he said during the presentation."We think that's really sub-optimal. And so what we're working on is sort of what the full realisation in technology might be in one to two decades".

If there is a more audacious business attempt involving an Australian entrepreneur, I'm yet to hear of it. He's either a visionary, completely nuts, or a bit of both.